This study analyzed 328 single- and group-authored stories composed by nine 4-year-olds in a mixed-age preschool class participating in a peer-oriented storytelling and story-acting practice. Group-authored stories (33 percent) were overwhelmingly told by same-gender groups. The frequencies, developmental trajectories, and functions of group-authored stories were different for girls and boys. Girls told mostly group-authored stories in the fall and single-authored stories in the spring. Group-authoring provided ‘brain-storming sessions’ for narrative experimentation; these stories were longer, with more dramatic problems and more sophisticated character portrayals. By the spring, girls’ single-authored stories also included these features, suggesting internalized narrative gains. Boys consistently preferred single-authored stories, though in the spring the frequency and quality of their group-authored stories increased. These were longer, with more sophisticated character portrayals, than single-authored stories. Group-authored stories made a distinctive contribution to narrative development, partly by helping boys and girls overcome limitations of their preferred narrative genres.
Aviezer, O. (in press) ‘Affective Meaning Making among Young Peers in Narrative Co-constructions’, in R. Emde , D. Oppenheim , and D. Wolf (eds) Revealing the Inner World of Young Children: The McArthur Story Stem Battery and Parent-Child Narratives. Oxford: Oxford University Press .
2.
Blum-Kulka, S. (1997) Dinner Talk: Cultural Patterns of Sociability and Socialization in Family Discourse. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum .
3.
Blum-Kulka, S. (in press a) ‘Modes of Meaning Making in Young Children’s Conversational Storytelling’, in J. Thornborrow and J. Coates (eds) The Sociolinguistics of Narrative. Antwerp: John Benjamins .
4.
Blum-Kulka, S. (in press b) ‘“I Will Tell You the Whole True Story Now”: Sequencing the Past, Present and Future in Children’s Conversational Narratives’, in D. Ravid and H. Bat-Zeev Shyldkrot (eds) Perspectives on Language and Language Development: Essays in Honor of Ruth A. Berman. Dordrecht: Kluwer .
5.
Blum-Kulka, S. and Snow, C. (1992) ‘Developing Autonomy for Tellers, Tales and Telling in Family Narrative Events’ , Journal of Narrative and Life History2: 187-217 .
6.
Blum-Kulka, S. and Snow, C. (eds) (2002) Talking to Adults: The Contribution of Multiparty Discourse to Language Acquisition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum .
7.
Booth, W.C. (1983) The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press .
8.
Bruner, J. (1990) Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press .
9.
Burger, L.K. and Miller, P.J. (1999) ‘Early Talk about the Past Revisited: Affect in Working-class and Middle-class Children’s Co-narrations’ , Journal of Child Language26: 133-162 .
10.
Eisenberg, A. (1985) ‘Learning to Describe Past Experiences in Conversation’ , Discourse Processes8: 177-204 .
11.
Fivush, R. and Fromhoff, F.A. (1988) ‘Style and Structure in Mother-Child Conversations about the Past’ , Discourse Processes11: 337-355 .
12.
Heath, S.B. (1982) ‘What No Bedtime Story Means: Narrative Skills at Home and School’ , Language in Society11: 49-76 .
13.
Heath, S.B. (1983) Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. New York: Cambridge University Press .
14.
Kuczaj, S.A. and McClain, L. (1984) ‘Of Hawks and Moozes: The Fantasy Narratives Produced by a Young Child’, in S.A. Kuczaj, II (ed.) Discourse Development: Progress in Cognitive Development Research, pp. 125-146. New York: Springer-Verlag .
15.
Küntay, A.C. and Senay, I. (2003) ‘Narratives Beget Narratives: Rounds of Stories in Turkish Preschool Conversations’ , Journal of Pragmatics35: 559-587 .
16.
McCabe, A. and Peterson, C. (1991) ‘Getting the Story: A Longitudinal Study of Parental Styles in Eliciting Narratives and Developing Narrative Skill’, in A. McCabe and C. Peterson (eds), Developing Narrative Structure, pp. 217-253. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum .
17.
Miller, P.J. and Sperry, L.L. (1988) ‘Early Talk about the Past: The Origins of Conversational Stories of Personal Experience’ , Journal of Child Language15: 293-315 .
18.
Nelson, K. (1996) Language in Cognitive Development: Emergence of the Mediated Mind. New York: Cambridge University Press .
19.
Nicolopoulou, A. (1996) ‘Narrative Development in Social Context’, in D.I. Slobin , J. Gerhardt , J. Guo and A. Kyratzis (eds) Social Interaction, Social Context, and Language: Essays in Honor of Susan Ervin-Tripp, pp. 369-390. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum .
20.
Nicolopoulou, A. (1997) ‘Worldmaking and Identity Formation in Children’s Narrative Play-acting’, in B.D. Cox and C. Lightfoot (eds) Sociogenetic Perspectives on Internalization, pp. 157-187. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum .
21.
Nicolopoulou, A. (1998) ‘The Elementary Forms of Narrative Coherence in Young Children’s Storytelling’ , paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Jean Piaget Society, Chicago, IL, June.
22.
Nicolopoulou, A. (2002) ‘Peer-group Culture and Narrative Development’, in S. Blum-Kulka and C.E. Snow (eds) Talking to Adults: The Contribution of Multiparty Discourse to Language Acquisition, pp. 117-152. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum .
23.
Nicolopoulou, A. and Cole, M. (1993) ‘The Generation and Transmission of Shared Knowledge in the Culture of Collaborative Learning: The Fifth Dimension, its Play-world, and its Institutional Contexts’, in E.A. Forman , N. Minick , and C.A. Stone (eds) Contexts for Learning: Sociocultural Dynamics in Children’s Development, pp. 283-314. New York: Oxford University Press .
24.
Nicolopoulou, A. and Richner, E.S. (1999) ‘The Development of Main Character in Young Children’s Narratives’ , poster for the International Congress for the Study of Child Language, University of the Basque Country, San Sebastián, 12-16 July.
25.
Nicolopoulou, A. and Richner, E.S. (in preparation) ‘From Actors to Agents to Persons: The Development of Character Representation in Young Children’s Narratives’. Psychology Department, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA .
26.
Nicolopoulou, A. , Scales, B. and Weintraub, J. (1994) ‘Gender Differences and Symbolic Imagination in the Stories of Four-year-olds’, in A.H. Dyson and C. Genishi (eds) The Need for Story: Cultural Diversity in Classroom and Community, pp. 102-123. Urbana, IL: NCTE .
27.
Nicolopoulou, A. and Weintraub, J. (1998) ‘Individual and Collective Representations in Social Context: A Modest Contribution to Resuming the Interrupted Project of a Sociocultural Developmental Psychology’ , Human Development41: 215-235 .
28.
Ochs, E. and Capps, L. (2001) Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press .
29.
Ochs, E. , Smith, R. and Taylor, C. (1989) ‘Detective Stories at Dinnertime: Problem-solving through Co-narration’ , Cultural Dynamics2: 238-257 .
30.
Paley, V. (1986) Mollie Is Three: Growing Up in School. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press .
31.
Paley, V. (1988) Bad Guys Don’t Have Birthdays. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press .
32.
Paley, V. (1990) The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter: The Uses of Storytelling in the Classroom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press .
33.
Palinscar, A.S. (1998) ‘Social Constructivist Perspectives on Teaching and Learning’ , Annual Review of Psychology49: 345-375 .
34.
Preece, A. (1992) ‘Collaborators and Critics: The Nature and Effects of Peer Interaction on Children’s Conversational Narratives’ , Journal of Narrative and Life History2: 277-29 .
35.
Richner, E.S. and Nicolopoulou, A. (2001) ‘The Narrative Construction of Differing Conceptions of the Person in the Development of Young Children’s Social Understanding’ , Early Education and Development12: 393-432 .
36.
Rogoff, B. (1998) ‘Cognition as a Collaborative Process’, in W. Damon (gen. ed.), D. Kuhn and R.S. Siegler (vol. eds) Handbook of Child Psychology, 5th edn, Vol. 2: Cognition, Perception and Language, pp. 679-744. New York: Wiley .
37.
Stone, P.K. (1992) ‘“You Know What?”: Conversational Narratives of Preschool Children’ , Early Childhood Research Quarterly7: 367-382 .
38.
Sutton-Smith, B. (1986) ‘The Development of Fictional Narrative Performances’ , Topics in Language Disorders7: 1-10 .
